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Prince of Wales's Ketchup
Take some ripe elderberries, and strip off the stalks. Fill a jar with the fruit, pour over it as much boiling vinegar as the vessel will hold; put it in a cool oven, and let it remain there all night. Strain the liquid, and put with every pint half a tea-spoonful of salt, a blade of mace, four shallots, a tea-spoonful of peppercorns, a dozen cloves, and two ounces of boned anchovies. Boil the liquid until the anchovies are dissolved, and when it is quite cold strain it, and bottle for use. This ketchup is chiefly used for fish.
An elderberry-and-anchovy fish sauce of the old school, closely related to pontack sauce. Two things decide whether it works: the berries must be dead ripe and entirely free of green stem, and the anchovies must be cooked until they melt.
- Berries only, no stemElder stems, leaves and unripe green berries contain cyanogenic compounds and are not food; only the fully ripe purple-black fruit is used. Strip the berries off the fine stalklets as well as the main stems — the instruction to "strip off the stalks" is doing real work here, not tidying.
- "A cool oven", overnightPeriod oven grades were not standardised; a "cool" oven is usually reckoned at somewhere in the region of 200-250F, in a coal range typically the falling heat after the fire had died down. Set a modern oven to its lowest setting, or 200F, and use a covered non-reactive jar or crock; a wide-mouth canning jar with the lid resting on loosely works.
- VinegarOrdinary cider or malt vinegar, brought to a full boil before pouring; modern bottled vinegar is generally 5% acidity. The hot vinegar draws the colour from the berries, and the acid holds that colour and preserves the finished sauce, so do not dilute it or substitute anything milder.
- A blade of maceOne whole piece of dried nutmeg aril, about a quarter teaspoon of ground mace if that is what you have. It is a mild, sweetish spice and easy to overdo in ground form.
- Boned anchoviesSalt-packed or oil-packed anchovy fillets, rinsed of excess salt, 2 oz per pint of strained liquid. Nineteenth-century recipes assumed whole salted anchovies that needed boning; fillets need only be chopped. Simmer gently and stir until no fibre remains — undissolved anchovy leaves the sauce gritty and it will not strain out cleanly.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon per pint is light because the anchovies bring most of the salt. Taste after the anchovies have dissolved rather than salting up front.
- Yield and storageStorage -- This is a strong vinegar-and-salt preparation, but it is not processed for shelf storage by modern standards: bottle it in clean jars and keep it refrigerated, where it will hold for months.
- How to use itA seasoning, not a condiment you pour freely. A teaspoon or two lifts a butter sauce for grilled or fried fish, and it does the same job in a stew or gravy that Worcestershire sauce does.
Elderberry ketchup under grand names was a standard of English kitchens long before tomato ketchup crowded the field: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries "ketchup" meant any thin, dark, salty seasoning liquid, most often built on mushrooms, walnuts, oysters or anchovies. This particular version is a near-twin of pontack sauce, an elderberry-and-spice fish sauce generally traced to Pontack's, the celebrated London tavern kept by the Bordeaux wine family of that name, and the recipes travel through the manuscript and printed cookbooks of the period under a shuffling set of titles. Attaching the Prince of Wales to a sauce was ordinary commercial and domestic flattery in the reign of Victoria, when the Prince of Wales was Edward, a famous eater whose name sold things. What the recipe really records is a seasonal habit: elder hedges fruit heavily in September, the berries are not eaten raw, being mildly toxic uncooked, and boiling vinegar poured over them in a slow-cooling oven turned a free crop into a year's worth of fish sauce.